The ‘killer bee’ born of two paradigms

(The lies are an attempt to pander to a dead paradigm which can never
work. The frustration in this section comes from the paradigm clash.
Needs a rewrite.)

We lie to you. Not the ‘we’ as in the authors of this book-like object,
but the ‘we’ who make up the modern day class of haruspex and seers:
advisors, consultants, pundits, academics, and trainers. We lie to you
by wrapping up what we think to be true into neat little stories, each
of which has the sound and smell of reasoning without the actual taste
or meat of a structured, logical argument. We lie to you because you
have demonstrated time and time again that the reason why you ask an
expert is that you simply aren’t interested in understanding what’s
actually going on. We lie to you by omitting important context because
we labour under the delusion that skipping years of study will somehow
make the issues more comprehensible to you, not less.

You… You want canned truth—easily opened and delivered, pre-digested so that you don't have to think about it—because you think knowledge and understanding is a liquid thing that can be poured from one container to another.

Most of all, because we need you to listen and pay attention to what we
say, we lie to you by telling you what you want to hear.

We lie to you because it’s the only way to get you to listen, because we
know you’ll never change your mind, and because it’s the only way to get
things done.

Calling the various digital storytelling forms ‘hybrids’ is one such
lie, albeit one of omission. It’s a useful lie for useful idiots. It’s been an essential touchstone concept for those of us who have been
trying to work in traditional media—trying to arbitrate between the two
paradigms. All at once it implies a blend of two forms—an attempt to get
the best of both—a fidelity with the past, a marriage of equals, while
still implying something uniquely new. It’s a way of getting the
terrified and closed-minded to work on something terrifying and open.
Scared people reacting only in defence rarely make interesting
things.

No matter how useful, it is a lie designed to flatter the past and is
built on a thick, mucous layer of platonic essentialism: the idea that
these forms can exist, or that their characteristics even make sense,
outside of their native environments—that abstract ideas exist somewhere pure and isolated from their context. It’s a tactic for navigating
around those who are stuck in the print paradigm while you try to get
things done.

In addition to the basic trauma of a paradigm shift, we’re watching a
specific kind of evolution in action.

Now, a lot of people don’t actually understand the concept of
evolution. They think they do but they don’t. In their minds
evolution is a hotchpotch of progress, manifest destiny, all mixed in
with a strange sprinkling of Protestant-style unconditional election.

(I’m not talking to you. I’m talking about the other ones.
The ones that brag about not understanding maths and how sciences “don’t
have the answers to everything” as if that excused their inability to
understand basic scientific concepts. The people who work in jobs that
require an understanding of digital media but, despite this being 2015
are burdened with a fuck-ton of weapons-grade ignorance on the subject.
You know, the people whose attitudes to science and maths make a Texan
School Board look intellectually progressive.)

Evolution. Let me explain.

Evolution isn’t progress. It has absolutely nothing to do with the idea
of progress. Evolution is cold and ruthless (as in Tennyson’s ‘nature is
red in tooth and claw’) precisely because it has no concept of progress
or inherent good. There is only adaptation. A bacteria that is now
immune to penicillin isn’t inherently better than its ancestors, it’s
just better adapted to an environment that has been pumped full of
penicillin. This may sound like progress but it isn’t because
adaptations are often costly and environments change, sometimes very
quickly. A trait that was a superior adaptation can become a liability
in the space of a single generation.

When two groups in a species start to diverge because they are,
generation by generation, adapting to differing environments, what
results is speciation.

That—speciation—is a word that comes a lot closer to describing what
is happening in digital media than hybridisation, especially since
hybridisation is merely one of the many forms that speciation can take.
Hybridisation is a subset of speciation. Sometimes it fails; sometimes
it doesn’t.

Let’s brush aside our jargon catch phrases for a moment; let’s
forget disruption; let’s assume that the paradigm shift is behind us;
and let’s just focus on what is happening in the here and now.

One form of adaptation that results in speciation happens when one
species is driven out of its old environment and mates with a related
species that’s better adapted to the new environment.

Like lately in Canada as polar bears are driven south to a warmer
climate and end up forming hybrids with grizzlies and brown bears.

The ebook, as embodied by IDPF’s ePub and Amazon’s Mobi formats, is a
hybrid, true, but an artificially bred one. It is the artificial and
disastrous killer bee
to the evolutionary if unsuccessful grolar
bear. The
ebook didn’t appear organically as publishing professionals began to
make digital projects filled with book-like qualities. It didn’t emerge
through experimentation as developers tried to infuse the values of
readability and novelistic storytelling into their websites, but
is instead defined by the backwards necessities of the old print
environment and the thinking of the print paradigm. Instead of making websites or apps that take cues and steal ideas, concepts, and methods from books, those who put together ebook platforms went the route of crippling web technology so that it would
fit the production processes, structures, and design of an environment
it will never inhabit. It is digital media constructed to fit the
limited confines of the print paradigm. It is a network node removed
from the network.

The evolutionary analog to current ebook formats wouldn’t be the
polar-grizzly hybrid but an escaped, lab-created monstrosity. The only
reason why the killer bee might not be an accurate analogy is that the
ebook is almost too deformed to be effectively harmful. It’s toxicity is
on the level of second-hand smoke and being too lazy to wash up your
dishes. More than anything else, it is ineffective at anything but the
plainest and simplest of texts. The ebook hybrid is about as adapted to
the digital environment as a coyote with gills would be to suburban
Texas.

Which wouldn’t be too bad if it weren’t for the fact that all ecosystems
are competitive ones, even the media environment, and ebooks simply
don’t work as well in digital as their peers.

This is why regular ebooks fall between the cracks in this ‘book’ of
ours. Ebooks don’t have the physical manifestation of meaning of their printed counterparts nor do they demonstrate a shred of the art of the printed book. What they do manage is to suffer from most of the limitations of print combined with the instability that makes digital design difficult. Which they do without exhibiting the same
massive adaptability that other digital forms get in return. Ebooks have some of
the readability and reader-oriented flexibility that other mediated
digital forms have (e.g. feed readers, Tumblr’s dashboard, Flipboard,
Twitter, Instapaper) but are disconnected from the hypertext of the web
and lack the dynamic, networked structure that make those apps useful.
Think of the difference between a regular downloaded ebook and a Wattpad
‘ebook’. The former may well have more features (though hard to
implement given how compromised modern ebook platforms are for
development) but the latter is immeasurably richer because it remains a
part of a larger, interconnected, and social context. A book written and
published on Wattpad is undeniably better adapted to the digital
environment than a regular ebook, even when it’s the same book that has
just been republished in two different contexts and even though it has much fewer features in terms of layout or typography.

The focus here is on the less compromised digital forms,
comparing contrasting them to the more embodied media like print. At
least, until the publishing industry comes to its senses and realises
that adapting ebooks to a print environment that no longer exists is
exactly what is holding ebooks back.